Interview: Unchaining God of War: Ascension's Jason McDonald and Mark Simon

PS: You’ve tweaked the Rage mechanic too. Again, was that to help increase the pace of the combat?

JM: It’s funny that you see it that way, because, like I say, we weren’t trying to make the game faster. But, yes, the old God modes would trickle up over time – and since it trickled up so slow, people would tend to just save it up and not use it. So, we wanted to give you a faster reward mechanism, and that’s what gave birth to the Rage mechanic. Now you can fill it up in every single fight, and then you can decide what to do with it.

PS: We’re fond of the lightning one.

JM: Nice.

PS: We got a 200 hit combo the other night. We were so proud of ourselves.

JM: [Laughs].

PS: Speaking of the elemental powers, what was the philosophy behind those?

JM: We wanted to put more of a focus on the blades. Even though Kratos picks up sub-weapons and does these other things, the blades are still his primary weapon. So, we wanted to see if we could apply more depth to them.

MS: Plus, it’s a throwback to the original God of War, right? Those elements were given to him by the Gods. At this point in the plot, they don’t hate Kratos.

JM: Furthermore, it creates a nice overlap with the multiplayer. Those elements match the same Gods that you align with.

PS: Talk a little bit about the enemies. You’re constantly repeating the same types, but it never really gets old. How do you keep that aspect interesting?

JM: Part of that is definitely the level design pacing. We try to place enemies so that you see them once on their own, and then we start pairing them with others. When we do that, it changes the way that you have to fight them. Just placing a Siren with a Medusa, for example, leads to a very different fight than just a Siren on her own.

MS: Right. The favourite fights are like pair a Medusa with a Harpy and watch the fun happen while the Harpies are bombing you and you’re stoned. But the combat guys are great, because all of the creatures have a signature, and because of that, a slight variation makes everything feel very, very fresh. Plus, we make sure that we don’t go combat, combat, combat, because it’ll get old and you’ll get really numb to it. We mix it up between navigation and puzzles, and when that takes place you get this nice blend between gameplay types.

PS: Obviously you can’t motion capture a Cyclops, so how do you get the enemies to look so smooth?

JM: Well, we have great animators. Our lead animator is Bruno Valasquez, who’s been here since God of War II. He knows exactly how to direct things when it comes to an animation standpoint. He’s also one of the primary Kratos animators as well. So, yeah, you’re right – we don’t motion capture the Cyclops or the dogs. In fact, we don’t motion capture any of the actual in-game action; we just do the cinematics. We put in a lot of time and effort, and content designers work directly with the animators to make sure we get exactly what we need.

PS: You’ve touched on it a little bit, but how do you go about designing a God of War game? Do the set-pieces come first or the plot?

MS: Both of those things simultaneously launch at the same time, right? Todd and [lead writer Marianne Krawczyk] have no idea what the story’s going to be exactly. They have a loose idea, a general framework, but we don’t have any of the plot details or locations. But they try to figure those things out at the same time as everyone else on the team is asking, “Where are we going? Who’s going to be the new cast that we’re going to fight against?” It’s all about being creative, and having the wildest ideas in the beginning. We start off with thousands of ideas, but we end up whittling them down to hundreds of ideas, and then finally to just a couple that make it into the final game.

JM: But it always starts with an initial goal. Todd knew that he wanted to detail this particular part of the fiction, so that was the real starting point. From there we’ll work on all of the stuff that Mark was talking about, and try to put all of the plot points in there.

MS: Right, and sometimes we’ll find a spot in the world that we really want to go to, and it might not be in the story, but we’ll weave it in. And the same is true for the narrative, too.

PS: Let’s talk about multiplayer. Why did you decide to add multiplayer now, and what would you say to the people online that don’t think that it’s necessary?

JM: The first worry that everyone had is that we’re a single-player studio, and if we’re going to make multiplayer, then we’re going to sacrifice the quality of the campaign. But we didn’t do that. We’ve still provided the same single-player experience that you expect.

But why did we do it? It’s because we were just having such a good time with it. Right after we finished work on God of War III, we tried [multiplayer] because it was something that we hadn’t tested much. We just tested some Kratoses fighting each other to see where that went – and we actually got it to a place where it was pretty fun. So, we decided to see what we could do to take it further, and that meant putting the God of War spin on it. We wanted to make sure that the same feeling that you get out of the single-player, the brutality and the epic scale, was present online too.

MS: It’s nice in terms of player investment as well. How much time have you got? Say you’ve got 15 minutes to get to school or work in the morning – you can jump in and play a multiplayer match. However, you can’t necessarily jump in and play a single-player episode, because you’re going to sit down and really spend some time with it.

The other thing is that you’ve never been able to create your own character in this world before, and that’s really compelling. You’re able to create your own guy, make your own bond with a God, customise your look, your fighting style, and it’s just a lot of fun.

JM: Yeah, and it’s a lot of content. One thing that I’ve been trying to stress is that this is definitely the biggest God of War that we’ve ever made in terms of the full single-player and the online component.

MS: I don’t think that we’ve even shown the full multiplayer yet.

JM: Yeah, we haven’t shown a lot of it. In open beta we showed two maps: one big one and one small one. But there are three other big ones in the full game, and three other small ones. There are also two other allegiances and more than double the amount of weapons that you saw. So, there’s a lot more to play with in there. We really tried to make it nice and bite-sized so you can jump in and play a quick match, but also deep and with tons of content.

PS: We played the beta a lot, especially on the map with Polyphemus. Are you worried that the big ending set-piece is going to wear out its welcome? Is there a skip option?

MS: No. We’re not worried because we listened to our community on a couple of different things. So, remember when the spear came down and it was a cut camera? We took that out. Now it doesn’t interrupt gameplay. The other thing is that when players start to get good at the game, that end cut-scene becomes incredibly difficult to achieve. It becomes one of those things that when somebody actually gets to pull it off, it’s extremely satisfying.

When people were starting off with the game it was new, so we almost set it up so that it would happen a lot because we wanted to show it off. But when it comes to actually balancing the tuning of it, it’s a lot more difficult to achieve.

JM: At E3 we made it very easy to pull.

MS: I think we guaranteed it.

JM: Right, but it was very important for the multiplayer designers that we made it something that was optional. Achieving that not only gives you that cool cinematic, but it also gives you a big points boost that can swing the match in your favour.

MS: Yeah, if you’re behind you can catch back up, but if you’re ahead then you’ve blown the match wide open. And the other thing is that each one of the maps that we’ve done, we’ve actually focused on different set-pieces that signature the level. So, some of them you’ll be familiar with from previous games like Hercules, whereas other ones are brand new like Polyphemus.

PS: If you’d told us that God of War: Ascension was running on a PlayStation 4, then we’d probably believe you. How have you managed to squeeze so much out of the PS3?

[b]MS: [Laughs]. It’s amazing. We have a crazy good team. We’ve got crazy good programmers that work really hard on making the game better and better with each project. And then we have an extremely dedicated environment among all of our staff. So, the modeller that did the model for Kratos in God of War III redid the character for this game. We rewrote a little bit of the rendering system so it would be a little cleaner. We added a new lighting system to bring a little more colour out of the world. And then we added this crazy awesome avatar system that allows you to customise your guy. Once you think that we’ve tapped out, once that you think that we’ve eclipsed what you possibly thought that we could do on one machine, we get another three years and we just go further.

JM: Yeah, I think the secret to this team is that no one is ever satisfied. We always want to do better.

PS: And just quickly, are we going to see Kratos on PS4?

MS: [Laughs]. PS3 is what we’re concentrating on. Seriously, multiplayer is still not done. When we go back to the States, we’ll continue to work on it.

PS: Thank you very much for your time, and best of luck with the launch.

For more on God of War: Ascension, don't forget to check out our full review.